Manufacturing is a target because it's easy for people to see concrete results. They can point at something and say, "we made that", and it tends to generate some sense of pride. The same doesn't really apply for service industries or innovation in the service industries: "we produced consumer surplus by lowering transportation costs via automation" doesn't roll off the tongue as well. :)
The same problem exists for creating software. Massive software projects tend to be unimpressive to people not familiar with the IT industry because they don't comprehend the scale or fundamental difficulties in computer science that were overcome to accomplish something.
Compare airplanes and wifi on airplanes. Most people are impressed by an A380, but they couldn't give two shits about the incredible technology behind offering wifi 5 miles above the Atlantic ocean at 700MPH ground speed. They just trivialize it by saying, "yeah, it comes from that little radio".
Manufacturing also provides jobs for both high and low skill workers. As such can be seen as more valuable to a community than say, a software company that only hires engineers and a CS center in a different state. Manufacturing was one of the best roads for a low skill worker to earn good money and move up the rung economically - something that only seems to be getting harder as time goes on.
This is the bottom line on American manufacturing:
> From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.
> American factories produced more goods last year than ever, by many indications. Yet they did so while employing about 12.3 million workers — roughly the same number as in 2009, when production was roughly three-fourths what it is today.
Most of the jobs that left are never coming back. They didn't go to Mexico or China; they simply disappeared because automation and productivity increases rendered them unnecessary.
If the US sheltered its manufacturing sector from foreign competition, a small number of jobs might come back, but the increased cost of manufacturing things in the US would strongly incentivize companies to automate those jobs away as quickly as possible.
Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance, both in terms of the imagery of hardworking middle-class factory workers and national pride, e.g. "Why don't we make things in this country anymore?" However, I suspect that most politicians who talk about a manufacturing revival understand that it won't really happen.
But there aren't a finite number of factories. If more factory work gets automated, then it will reduce the cost of building more factories and producing even more goods.
Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable.
In any case, the service based jobs are just as vulnerable to automation. There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
That study is bullshit. It's probably more the opposite - ~15% job losses caused by automation and 85% caused by trade policy.
You only have to look at their opinions on "right to work" laws to see whose side they're batting for (not employees).
Automation is simply being used as a scapegoat and a political justification for keeping trade policies that export jobs in place.
>Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance,
Manufacturing ecosystems take decades to fully destroy and decades to fully rebuild. The flow of goods on container ships can be halted overnight - which has happened before and will happen again.
There's a country that begins with Z and a country that begins with V that enacted policies that deliberately sabotaged their local industrial and agricultural base and assumed they could always just import what they needed. Spoiler alert: it didn't end well for either of them.
The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are.
Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast.
Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a wrong thing to want.
The rage may be misplaced, but the rage is still valid. There is basically skilled jobs and minimum wage jobs. You are saying "they're misinformed" but they are not actually incorrect. So what do you suggest we do instead of focusing on manufacturing jobs?
(I would love to suggest something, unfortunately, I have zero ideas, and not sure where to get any ideas, frankly.)
This is my favourite counter to millenials complaining about how booomers had jobs handed to them on a platter. "What, you want an unfulfilling factory job doing the same mundane thing day in, day out, probably on your feet, and probably without climate control? And if you're a woman, explicitly get paid less for it?"
The boomers may have had a higher employment rate, but they weren't design consultants and business analysts and so forth.
The only way this line of argument would make any sense would be if first world countries such as Germany (which manages to keep well paid manufacturing jobs at home) didn't, well...exist.
Manufacturing has a history of high growth and employment. Services do not. Economically, service domination means an overall slow-growth economy. Even highly intellectual services do not come close to the historic growth / employment curve the nation enjoyed when it was dominated by manufacturing. Wealth distribution is also heavily-weighted toward to the top with services. Generally democracies fare better when wealth is more broadly-held.
Good points. However, the macroeconomic benefits of manufacturing don't necessarily require people to be employed in manufacturing, do they? If America builds enough productive, highly-automated factories, the country is still generating wealth. As long as some of this wealth is captured for the people, then standard of living can increase.
Not sure why this is being down-voted: it's pretty well established that service economies have limited potential to export or achieve economies of scale, and thus unable to benefit from expanding global trade.
The holy grail for politicians is growth in jobs that pay well but don't require college degrees or a ton of specialized training. Manufacturing provided those jobs for decades.
That's why they are obsessed with manufacturing. If someone could come up with another industry that does the same thing for unskilled workers, then politicians would back that just as hard.
The sad part is that manufacturing itself no longer pays unskilled workers well. People blame China but it's arguable that automation and machines have taken more jobs.
This is why free college for everyone in the U.S. is a good idea. Our economy is leveling up, and it's time to level up our education too.
The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace.
The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians are addressing are working from a memory of a time when "men were men", that worked hard in a physical way to produce a physical product; in the memory, these working men didn't think and didn't emote, they produced.
Now, the voter says, men have been "feminized" by being forced out of a productive, provider role where a single income could support the family. Instead, they are placed into a role where they need to express concern, care, and use soft skills instead of physical strength.
And when they want the same pay and security they had before, they are instead told to "learn to code" (or learn whatever, get an education). Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
You make some good points but I think you go a little off the rails with the social commentary.
The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives).
A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes.
The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all.
Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore.
Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.
>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
Andy Grove spent the last decade or so of his life crusading about this. He framed the problem as, Silicon Valley invests a great deal in creating innovation, but outsources the scaling of it. Even though that may be in the short term best interests of the companies doing the outsourcing, both they and the country lose out on the economic growth, jobs, and crucial institutional knowledge that scaling innovations brings. And the knowledge transfer to other countries better enables them to continue building on the original innovation, developing their own capacity for original innovation.
>Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
Because when the shit comes to shove and the global economy takes a nosedive or your previous friendly third world manufactures give you the finger, having a "service industry" is worth nothing, but being able to produce the actual shit your businesses design and sell/export, matters.
Of course for the US this might be less so, because they can always force, by diplomacy or might, those developing world manufacturers to comply.
Another question would be why are people like the author of the article not particularly hot for manufacturing?
Because they are upper middle class pundits, have worked all their lives in the culture/media/academic etc industries, and could not care less for lost manufacturing jobs and other such stuff.
That's how we get books about the world being flat, industry doesn't matter, it's all "information" and "creativity" now, from people that could not suffer a day without electricity (and the hard work that goes into producing it), or without their car, etc.
The votes that can turn the tide in this election are those in the rust belt. Manufacturing is the key word that gets their attention. I believe that's why. All other reasons are secondary. It was about the financial crisis in 2008 and Bain Capital in 2012 which ended up affecting manufacturing jobs.
yep, politicians say what their voters like to hear (and do what their donors want to be done :). For example California politicians don't talk about manufacturing, instead they talk education, environment/climate change, security, minorities rights, some talk agriculture, etc... some even talk UFO/aliens (if you didn't read the official CA booklet listing candidates and their statements for this year race for the US Senate Barbara Boxer's seat you missed a lot of fun :)
--[T]here can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation.
--[T]here were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides.... Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers.
Given the opportunity, I think I'd vote for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG to manage the executive branch instead of our current Presidential candidates.
Here's the US table of employment by category.[1] (I keep mentioning this table in discussions of employment.) 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff. That's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 14%. US manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Manufacturing output is at peak now.
That 14% number was about 50% in 1950, and maybe 90% in 1900. That's how much things have changed.
As for imports, China's government has decided that it is going to reduce its imports from the rest of the world. This is part of the "China 2025" program announced by Li Keqiang in 2015.[2] The US may have to reduce its imports from China to keep up. At most, though, this will add a few percent to manufacturing employment.
>According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides — more than double the population of Pittsburgh. Next year, there will be fewer steelworkers and still more home health aides, as baby boomers fade into old age. Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers.
I'm picking up a sort of 'gamers are dead' vibe from all this. I wonder if the media considers Gamergate a sort of success story and template for future political discourse? The argument would be that the issues faced by outgroup demographic X are not real, because outgroup demographic X is dying anyway, and is being replaced by ingroup demographic Y, and is also full of misogynists and/or racists and/or basement dwellers and/or rednecks and/or Trump voters.
As supporting evidence, I will note the author just casually slipped in there that steel workers are all white men while service workers are mostly women.
Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they'd do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the thing they're really good at is politics.
It sucks because they're called on to provide solutions to deep problems, with only the skills of enthusiastic amateurs. Manufacturing solved a lot of problems. It's completely reasonable for an amateur to look at history for past solutions to current problems.
For reference, the us congress has a panel of 700 or so experts in all sorts of fields to help write policy. This is in addition to each congresspersons's staff. There's something on the order of 2000 people available to write legislation. And about 10000 pieces of legislation written. So each potential law gets a few months of effort.
It boils down to a congressperson (probably a lawyer), a few enthusiastic political scientists, and a few economists to shape national policy.
It's not that they don't produce good work. They're smart hardworking people. A trillion dollar budget is probably as difficult to produce as a decent compiler. That's the kind of thing we'll see congress try to slap together right after the election. It's not much different than a team of undergrads trying to get their compiler to pass test cases.
It's not inherently bad, it's that sometimes problems are really hard, and they should probably be handled by experts. We don't have a good way of collectively picking experts, so we pick amateurs and hope for the best.
Contrast a politician with a juror. There's no real reason for a juror to focus on anything but the case at hand. They don't have a career as a juror to pursue, yet they're expected to learn about things relevant to the case. There's almost no personal incentives involved (which also happens to be heavily policed) besides scheduling.
Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior.
I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians.
Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving.
If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.
Governments employ experts in myriad capacities. Some of these experts achieved their position through actual merit rather than successful politicking.
I think many politicians, despite appearances, actually listen to these expert advisers. It takes a generalist to integrate information from disparate domains of expertise and make a decision. It takes a political expert to establish public support for the decision and shepherd it through various levels of government.
This represents an idealized picture of government, of course, and may not correspond with the reality in any particular country.
Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change.
We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet.
The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery).
Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.
The government deciding to build a submarine fleet 'in Australia' was a huge election issue. The local unions around here are campaigning on forcing state government to use 'local' steel as a condition of their tender process for infrastructure projects. I think they have a point somewhat, it is pretty absurd that they built a sports stadium about 2km up the road from our huge steel plant and imported all the Steel for it.
I don't think there is an easy answer. Throwing the industry the odd submarine or two to supply material for isn't long term sustainable. However If it is enough to kick-start a ship building industry though who knows...
The Great Depression saw the "creative destruction" of farm labor. People migrated to cities and it took a long time for the economy to shift to manyfacturing.
Manufacturing jobs disappeared more gradually, but are now gone due to automation and outsourcing.
The only way they will come back is to robots.
The next sector is IP, it's one of the USA's biggest exports -- movies, music, ideas, brands, etc. Designed in California, assembled in China. That's why the USA has such a strong IP lobby and negotiates international treaties and bullies guys like Kin Dotcom.
What's left after that? Well, why do we all NEED jobs? Because currently wages is the primary mechanism of getting money to the masses. But demand for human labor is falling.
"For every $1.00 spent in manufacturing, another $1.81 is added to the economy. That is the highest multiplier effect of any economic sector. In addition, for every one worker in manufacturing, there are another four employees hired elsewhere. (Source: NAM calculations using IMPLAN.) - See more at: http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
Is there some dystopian novel where the majority of workers spend their time taking CAPTCHAs? I almost expect it to happen, as a way to keep the masses occupied in a way that's difficult to automate.
I figured they were just suckers for factory tours, or at least photos ops with the "working man".
Also, a lot of the Left longs for the days of big factories and big union collective bargaining that could raise the wages a lot of people quickly. It's a great thing to point to with good economies of scale. Globalization has made this a mostly untenable strategy, but the longing remains.
They're not, but the demographic they need to appeal to is, and it's not clear how to sell people on capitalism in an age of diminishing labor requirements. Capitalism as we know it is almost over; there is no rational reason for people to starve while a tiny minority accumulates all the capital. History tells us that once enough people figure out that they've got no prospects they'll gang up on the elite, kill them, and attempt to redistribute the spoils.
I'm not being hyperbolic, I expect western-style democracy to collapse within the next 10-20 years.
Maybe because they're catering to a vote bank that was most affected by manufacturing / factory jobs that went overseas? And there's little else those voters could relate to other than someone bringing back the jobs that they know well. There's also the righting the wrong thing that's appealing to many.
As TFA points out there is little chance of revival of American manufacturing. TFA makes a very good point that most of those who lost their factory jobs have moved to service industry and that's what the candidates should focus on making better.
Because this is the work people who didn't go to college or uni can do and make a "middle class income" with a little vocational training (no real maths needed).
[+] [-] hueving|9 years ago|reply
The same problem exists for creating software. Massive software projects tend to be unimpressive to people not familiar with the IT industry because they don't comprehend the scale or fundamental difficulties in computer science that were overcome to accomplish something.
Compare airplanes and wifi on airplanes. Most people are impressed by an A380, but they couldn't give two shits about the incredible technology behind offering wifi 5 miles above the Atlantic ocean at 700MPH ground speed. They just trivialize it by saying, "yeah, it comes from that little radio".
[+] [-] rfrank|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, but "check out our shiny robot trucks" seems to be an acceptable brag these days. :)
[+] [-] twblalock|9 years ago|reply
This is the bottom line on American manufacturing:
> From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.
> American factories produced more goods last year than ever, by many indications. Yet they did so while employing about 12.3 million workers — roughly the same number as in 2009, when production was roughly three-fourths what it is today.
Most of the jobs that left are never coming back. They didn't go to Mexico or China; they simply disappeared because automation and productivity increases rendered them unnecessary.
If the US sheltered its manufacturing sector from foreign competition, a small number of jobs might come back, but the increased cost of manufacturing things in the US would strongly incentivize companies to automate those jobs away as quickly as possible.
Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance, both in terms of the imagery of hardworking middle-class factory workers and national pride, e.g. "Why don't we make things in this country anymore?" However, I suspect that most politicians who talk about a manufacturing revival understand that it won't really happen.
[+] [-] pavedwalden|9 years ago|reply
The thought that maybe some of them don't understand that is what scares me the most.
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable.
In any case, the service based jobs are just as vulnerable to automation. There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|9 years ago|reply
You only have to look at their opinions on "right to work" laws to see whose side they're batting for (not employees).
Automation is simply being used as a scapegoat and a political justification for keeping trade policies that export jobs in place.
>Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance,
Manufacturing ecosystems take decades to fully destroy and decades to fully rebuild. The flow of goods on container ships can be halted overnight - which has happened before and will happen again.
There's a country that begins with Z and a country that begins with V that enacted policies that deliberately sabotaged their local industrial and agricultural base and assumed they could always just import what they needed. Spoiler alert: it didn't end well for either of them.
[+] [-] superuser2|9 years ago|reply
The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are.
Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast.
Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a wrong thing to want.
[+] [-] prewett|9 years ago|reply
(I would love to suggest something, unfortunately, I have zero ideas, and not sure where to get any ideas, frankly.)
[+] [-] vacri|9 years ago|reply
The boomers may have had a higher employment rate, but they weren't design consultants and business analysts and so forth.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbauman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titanomachy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbauman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|9 years ago|reply
That's why they are obsessed with manufacturing. If someone could come up with another industry that does the same thing for unskilled workers, then politicians would back that just as hard.
The sad part is that manufacturing itself no longer pays unskilled workers well. People blame China but it's arguable that automation and machines have taken more jobs.
This is why free college for everyone in the U.S. is a good idea. Our economy is leveling up, and it's time to level up our education too.
[+] [-] steven777400|9 years ago|reply
The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians are addressing are working from a memory of a time when "men were men", that worked hard in a physical way to produce a physical product; in the memory, these working men didn't think and didn't emote, they produced.
Now, the voter says, men have been "feminized" by being forced out of a productive, provider role where a single income could support the family. Instead, they are placed into a role where they need to express concern, care, and use soft skills instead of physical strength.
And when they want the same pay and security they had before, they are instead told to "learn to code" (or learn whatever, get an education). Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
[+] [-] jordanb|9 years ago|reply
The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives).
A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes.
The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all.
Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore.
Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.
[+] [-] choicewords|9 years ago|reply
Just look at SpaceX. It's cool, it's tech and it is most certainly hard material science.
We won't be able to make it with just soft skills and software. Improving our material lives (including not wasting resources) matters.
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
[+] [-] wildmusings|9 years ago|reply
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
[+] [-] 2AF3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madengr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Preference_for_a_...
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Because when the shit comes to shove and the global economy takes a nosedive or your previous friendly third world manufactures give you the finger, having a "service industry" is worth nothing, but being able to produce the actual shit your businesses design and sell/export, matters.
Of course for the US this might be less so, because they can always force, by diplomacy or might, those developing world manufacturers to comply.
Another question would be why are people like the author of the article not particularly hot for manufacturing?
Because they are upper middle class pundits, have worked all their lives in the culture/media/academic etc industries, and could not care less for lost manufacturing jobs and other such stuff.
That's how we get books about the world being flat, industry doesn't matter, it's all "information" and "creativity" now, from people that could not suffer a day without electricity (and the hard work that goes into producing it), or without their car, etc.
[+] [-] sriram_sun|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloworld|9 years ago|reply
--[T]here can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation.
--[T]here were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides.... Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers.
Given the opportunity, I think I'd vote for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG to manage the executive branch instead of our current Presidential candidates.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
That 14% number was about 50% in 1950, and maybe 90% in 1900. That's how much things have changed.
As for imports, China's government has decided that it is going to reduce its imports from the rest of the world. This is part of the "China 2025" program announced by Li Keqiang in 2015.[2] The US may have to reduce its imports from China to keep up. At most, though, this will add a few percent to manufacturing employment.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/922394.shtml
[+] [-] drewrv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serge2k|9 years ago|reply
Why not just give them whatever money they ask for and be done with it?
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yakult|9 years ago|reply
I'm picking up a sort of 'gamers are dead' vibe from all this. I wonder if the media considers Gamergate a sort of success story and template for future political discourse? The argument would be that the issues faced by outgroup demographic X are not real, because outgroup demographic X is dying anyway, and is being replaced by ingroup demographic Y, and is also full of misogynists and/or racists and/or basement dwellers and/or rednecks and/or Trump voters.
As supporting evidence, I will note the author just casually slipped in there that steel workers are all white men while service workers are mostly women.
[+] [-] jfoutz|9 years ago|reply
It sucks because they're called on to provide solutions to deep problems, with only the skills of enthusiastic amateurs. Manufacturing solved a lot of problems. It's completely reasonable for an amateur to look at history for past solutions to current problems.
For reference, the us congress has a panel of 700 or so experts in all sorts of fields to help write policy. This is in addition to each congresspersons's staff. There's something on the order of 2000 people available to write legislation. And about 10000 pieces of legislation written. So each potential law gets a few months of effort.
It boils down to a congressperson (probably a lawyer), a few enthusiastic political scientists, and a few economists to shape national policy.
It's not that they don't produce good work. They're smart hardworking people. A trillion dollar budget is probably as difficult to produce as a decent compiler. That's the kind of thing we'll see congress try to slap together right after the election. It's not much different than a team of undergrads trying to get their compiler to pass test cases.
It's not inherently bad, it's that sometimes problems are really hard, and they should probably be handled by experts. We don't have a good way of collectively picking experts, so we pick amateurs and hope for the best.
[+] [-] white-flame|9 years ago|reply
Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior.
I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians.
Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving.
If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.
[+] [-] titanomachy|9 years ago|reply
I think many politicians, despite appearances, actually listen to these expert advisers. It takes a generalist to integrate information from disparate domains of expertise and make a decision. It takes a political expert to establish public support for the decision and shepherd it through various levels of government.
This represents an idealized picture of government, of course, and may not correspond with the reality in any particular country.
[+] [-] maverick_iceman|9 years ago|reply
That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
That's what's great about them, because they are there to represent us, and we're all, in most fields other than ours, amateurs.
And also because most experts on economy and industry have private interests to take care off and force upon the rest.
(Well, those private interests also buy politicians, yes, but they always start by buying or directly employing experts).
[+] [-] JDiculous|9 years ago|reply
Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change.
We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet.
The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery).
Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
Writing good laws is not entirely unimportant, but it is a much smaller factor. And, as you say, they have experts to help out with that stuff.
[+] [-] bigger_cheese|9 years ago|reply
Australia also has worse Anti-dumping protections then the US. China is dumping steel (i.e selling below cost) into our market - see: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/china-trade-arrangemen...
The government deciding to build a submarine fleet 'in Australia' was a huge election issue. The local unions around here are campaigning on forcing state government to use 'local' steel as a condition of their tender process for infrastructure projects. I think they have a point somewhat, it is pretty absurd that they built a sports stadium about 2km up the road from our huge steel plant and imported all the Steel for it.
I don't think there is an easy answer. Throwing the industry the odd submarine or two to supply material for isn't long term sustainable. However If it is enough to kick-start a ship building industry though who knows...
[+] [-] wycx|9 years ago|reply
When I call up steel suppliers and ask if they have any maraging steel, they just laugh at me.
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
The Great Depression saw the "creative destruction" of farm labor. People migrated to cities and it took a long time for the economy to shift to manyfacturing.
Manufacturing jobs disappeared more gradually, but are now gone due to automation and outsourcing.
The only way they will come back is to robots.
The next sector is IP, it's one of the USA's biggest exports -- movies, music, ideas, brands, etc. Designed in California, assembled in China. That's why the USA has such a strong IP lobby and negotiates international treaties and bullies guys like Kin Dotcom.
What's left after that? Well, why do we all NEED jobs? Because currently wages is the primary mechanism of getting money to the masses. But demand for human labor is falling.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
"For every $1.00 spent in manufacturing, another $1.81 is added to the economy. That is the highest multiplier effect of any economic sector. In addition, for every one worker in manufacturing, there are another four employees hired elsewhere. (Source: NAM calculations using IMPLAN.) - See more at: http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
[+] [-] andrewfong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasenj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpinkston|9 years ago|reply
Also, a lot of the Left longs for the days of big factories and big union collective bargaining that could raise the wages a lot of people quickly. It's a great thing to point to with good economies of scale. Globalization has made this a mostly untenable strategy, but the longing remains.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
I'm not being hyperbolic, I expect western-style democracy to collapse within the next 10-20 years.
[+] [-] blinkingled|9 years ago|reply
As TFA points out there is little chance of revival of American manufacturing. TFA makes a very good point that most of those who lost their factory jobs have moved to service industry and that's what the candidates should focus on making better.
[+] [-] mc32|9 years ago|reply
Same as why the mittelstand is so important.